this is mikel.org — Page 232 — Michael Boyle's weblog

Mark Lepage

November 13, 2003 by Michael Boyle

on the Montreal pop scene, then and now. From maisonneuve magazine, a new-ish glossy mag from right here in Montreal.

I’m back!

November 12, 2003 by Michael Boyle

As of just a few minutes ago, mikel.org is back on the air.

The month-long absence of this site was caused by a very unfortunate problem with the company who I used to use as a virtual host, PlanetESS, based in Toronto. They managed to completely munge the box this site and probably thousands of others were on, and they somehow managed to overwrite their backup in the process. Everything on the server was lost.

Since I only moved over to Movable Type a few months ago I had most of the old content backed up, but I hadn’t done that for the more recent stuff. So I had to re-install MT on a new host (the so far excellent BlackSun), rebuild all the templates from local copies and re-write some that I had put together quickly only on the lost server. Luckily Google came to the rescue – it had cached my whole site and though it required some manual and BBEdit-assisted work, I think I got most, if not all, of the content back and then deployed most of it last night.

Lessons from this experience? No matter how tempting, and how simple it seems, keep a local backup of everything on your server. It’s not always simple to do, but it would have saved me lots of effort.

Test

November 10, 2003 by Michael Boyle

Test 123 I need more text I need more text. I need more text I need more text. I need more text I need more text. I need more text I need more text. I need more text I need more text. I need more text I need more text. I need more text I need more text. I need more text I need more text. I need more text I need more text. I need more text I need more text.

On Friday, ICANN

October 6, 2003 by Michael Boyle

formally asked Verisign to cease the deployment of its Sitefinder “service” in a Letter from Paul Twomey to Russell Lewis. The former is the president and CEO of ICANN, the latter is the EVP and GM of Verisign Naming Services. As far as I can tell they have not yet complied with the request from ICANN.

Electronic Voting:

September 25, 2003 by Michael Boyle

Farhad Manjoo has written an excellent article about touch-screen voting and a woman who has researched the system that will be widely used in upcoming elections: An open invitation to election fraud. It’s at Salon.com, so you’ll probably have to click through an ad to view the whole article.